To Build Their AI Tech, Microsoft and Google are Using a Lot of Water – Slashdot
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They’re called “cooling towers”, Bob.
Rain not only later, but somewhere else. So it may be a problem.
(It’s not guaranteed to be a problem, if you do it right. The desert is very cold at night, even during the summer, so just expose it to the night air. Roman troops used to make “ice cream” (well, not really, but frozen dessert anyway) in the Sahara that way. IIUC it took them a couple of days to get the stuff frozen, and they REALLY had to insulate it during the day, but it worked.)
That’s a pretty neat idea, if you had a large enough reservoir of water and enough cooling towers, you could conceivably pull that off.
But I suspect the cost of building it would be prohibitive…
Why not just increase cost of subscriptions, while blaming inflation?
“Some” is lost to evaporation. How about “all” is lost to evaporation. What do you think all that water is doing exactly dude. That’s what a “cooling tower” does.
As a rule of thumb for cooling towers, about 1.5% of the gpm circulating is lost to evaporation and drift (mist that’s blown out of the cooling tower before evaporating) and about another 1.5% is “blow down” (purposefully discharged to drain to keep the level of dissolved solids at a reasonable level). So a 1,000 Ton cooling system that circulat
The issue would be that water with drinking water quality is used. That’s not needed for cooling.
The issue would be that water with drinking water quality is used. That’s not needed for cooling.
You definitely don’t want to drink the water from a cooling tower – to many additives for corrosion resistance, killing algae, etc. But they do need to use clean water for makeup to keep the pipes and heat exchangers in good shape.
TFA is misleading in many ways.
Heating water is not “using it up”. It is still available for irrigation and other uses, even if it’s warm. TFA even says that one data center is “literally made next to cornfields”, where warm water is not a problem. Warm water can encourage crop growth in the spring, lengthen the growing season, and increase yields.
1.2B gallons is 3682 acre-feet. Farmers in California pay $70/acre-foot for water. So that’s $247K, or about the burdened cost of two employees. There are single
If we want to conserve water, instead of closing data centers, we should stop growing subsidized rice in the desert. That’s where the waste is.
Or growing alfalfa which is shipped to countries with too much desert [npr.org] and horses [cbsnews.com].
Unfortunately, this is part of hysteric reporting on some environmental issues that are not actually much of a problem. Another recent example was the reporting on the Fukushima water release.
I am unsure whether this is done deliberately to be able to better hide the climate catastrophe we are already seeing the first effects of by reporting obvious nonsense in a similar area to make people think all reporting on climate problems is nonsense (and there are many, many that are all to ready and willing to believe that). Or whether this is people that actually want to do something about climate change, but are too uninformed and hence barke up entirely the wrong trees. In both cases, this is not good at all.
Race to the bottom? Idiocracy realized? Meme virus? Dumb and Dumber normalized?
This is people turning against the push for generative AI and finding every possible fault with it.
Which, as far as I am concerned, carry on. Had it been presented for what it is, it would have been interesting to tinker with and help it grow and find some utility in it. As it is, it needs to die a fiery death, in that all the con men and grifters peddling fake AI wares need to lose their money in a spectacular tech stock crash. Maybe that will remind people that this industry used to be about creating good
So far generative AI has not impressed me. All it can do is generate lewd images with reasonable quality if you try long enough. Nice application but in no way a game-changer. Just give it some time and it will vanish into its niche, same as LLMs.
Not only. There was enough baseless and ignorant hysterics before China even had a press release.
What we are really talking about here is grey water, suitable for some uses., but not others
This is not grey water.
YMMV, but about 1.5% of the water circulated within the cooling system would be evaporated and about another 1.5% discharged to sewers – that is the water reported as being used up. The part evaporated will come down as rain somewhere else, but will not recharge the aquifer or reservoir it was pumped from. The part discharged to sewer is not typically fit for grey water use because of the a
we should stop growing subsidized rice in the desert. That’s where the waste is.
we should stop growing subsidized rice in the desert. That’s where the waste is.
Where is subsidized rice grown in the desert? If you’re talking about California, most of the rice is grown in the Sacramento river valley, which is not a desert.
Heating water is not “using it up”.
It is used up. Refrigeration equipment heats the water up. Cooling towers cool the water down by evaporating some of the circulating water and then blowing down (draining) some more to prevent the amount of dissolved solids to get too high. They add all sorts of biocides, corrosion inhibitors, etc. to protect the piping and equipment, so the discharged water is not suitable for crop irrigation. Still, a once-through system just pumping from a well and then discharging
It always rains down from the sky somewhere before you use it. And unless you happen to be directly under that rain, you pay dollars for someone to pump it out of the ground or a waterway to deliver it to you, after which it either evaporates back into the sky or gets dumped back into the ground to cool off.
Talking about cooling water in the same breath as sustainability is just green shaming or green preening that has nothing to do with anything. But so few people understand that it’s literally impossible
Would the rising tailings pond at Butte, Montana like a word?
BBC panorama
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/… [bbc.co.uk]
Imagine if the water was piped to provide hot water to the neighboring buildings. You could shower in smart AI water!
Some idiot is gonna pay the big bucks for that!
It really does seem like a crime to waste the captured heat, never mind the water itself. Obviously they’re not heating it enough to crack it into hydrogen and oxygen, but pulling from municipal water and dumping to sewage will waste a lot of resources unnecessarily.
Even if it’s just coming out ‘warm’, that’s still a nice input to have – a quick Google search says the output temp is ~65C or 149F, and that is more than enough for heating a building (or, presumably, getting some pre-warmed water for a hot wa
Even if it’s just coming out ‘warm’, that’s still a nice input to have – a quick Google search says the output temp is ~65C or 149F . . .
What was your Google search searching for? Typical condenser water temperatures are 85F entering the refrigeration equipment and 95F leaving.
Imagine if the water was piped to provide hot water to the neighboring buildings. You could shower in smart AI water!
Besides the fact that this is not potable, or even clean, water suitable for use in a shower, the water temperature is typically too low to be usable for hot water.
Noone has explained what these server centers are doing.
Collecting personal information based on all the questions you ask and your login information.
Cooling towers don’t cut water waste, they increase it. The water goes into the air, where it cannot be used until it falls out again at best — and a lot of rainfall simply runs off and is lost before it enters an aquifer, despite the fact that much of it came from one at the “start” of its journey (after sitting there for years to centuries.)
Cooling towers don’t cut water waste, they increase it.
Well, they only use up about 3% of the circulating water. That’s a lot less than the 100% that a once-thru system would use. Unless you meant to compare a cooling tower system with a less energy efficient all-air system, which you didn’t mention.
I would assume liquid to be involved at some stage, what that looks like these days I don’t know or care to research. But they’re clearly using some kind of open system if the water use is this large.
Aren’t they just using it for cooling? If so, the water doesn’t disappear and it probably isn’t polluted after use. I imagine some is evaporated during its use and the rest returned, albeit (possibly much) warmer. This may be an issue for fish and other wildlife, but not for water scarcity.
If the climate isn’t hot you could heat treat it by letting it cool off in pipes or in some uncovered pool and when it gets cold enough you dump it back into the river.
Aren’t they just using it for cooling? If so, the water doesn’t disappear and it probably isn’t polluted after use.
No, part of the water is evaporated and part of it is drained. The part that is drained is polluted by the chemical treatment added to the water. Without the chemical treatment you’d have to replace the piping and equipment frequently.
You skipped over the word “cooling tower” entirely huh? What aquatic life do think there is in Des Moines, Iowa?
You skipped over the word “cooling tower” entirely huh? What aquatic life do think there is in Des Moines, Iowa?
Smallmouth bass.
https://www.iowadnr.gov/Fishin… [iowadnr.gov]
That’s what I was thinking, but apparently it’s more complicated than that. The water picks up impurities during evaporation, making it difficult to simply re-use. It seems possible to use this ‘blowdown’ water, if it’s treated to avoid impurities accelerating corrosion.
NOOOO STOP USING THE WATER! Once you run it over your hot GPUs it disappears, never to be seen again!
WE. NEED. TO. STOP. THESE. TECH. BROS.
Did the tech bros start it though?
We keep throwing words with no concern for their meaning. Data. Theft. Consumption.
You may call me a stuck up a-hole if it makes you feel better, but I suspect we’re not gonna make any progress, nor solve any problem, if we misuse a language. If we fail to communicate our thoughts as accurately as we can.
Then again, what is a “thought”?
Thatcher: “Kane, I happen to know you used 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water last year!”
Kane: “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did use 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools last year. I expect to use 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools this year. I expect to use 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools next year.”
“You know, Mr. Thatcher. At 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools a year, I’ll have to close this place…in 600 million years!”
Cue horn: wah wah wah wah waaaaaaaaaaaaah
1.7 B gallons sounds why more impressive than 2500 pools.
The use of the word seems to imply that the water gets used irrevocably, disappeared, when in fact it is just drawn for cooling and returned to source, So what?
What’s worse is that all those engineers are breathing a lot of air. That is a complete waste of air, a scarce resource. All air use should be metered and controlled by the government and taxed.
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